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Sunday, October 14, 2007

Beyond belief

In an Oct. 11th post at her website, Debbie Schlussel said that George Soros is a "a Jew who proudly worked for the Nazis rounding up Jews and sending them to their deaths."

That is actionable defamation. Has this woman no decency? Apparently not.

To support her claim, Schlussel linked to an April 18 post in which she smeared Soros (a Hungarian-born Jew who survived the Holocaust) as "a fake Holocaust survivor, who -- instead of 'surviving' the Holocaust -- helped the Nazis perpetrate it."

In addition to this truly heinous slander of George Soros

Schlussel also wrote in her post, "I believe Donny Deutch [sic] was lying about his own religious status" in the interview, and that she "doubt[s] that" he is a "practicing Jew," because "his show is on live during the Jewish Sabbath, and keeping the Jewish Sabbath is the most important commandment for a religious Jew to keep." During the interview, Coulter said to Deutsch: "Well, you could be a practicing Jew, but you're not." Deutsch responded: "I actually am. That's not true. I really am."

Additionally, Schlussel claimed, "True religious Jews are not offended by Ann's comments," and added, "It's only the Jewish libs, like Deutch [sic], who are feigning this shock and outrage. That's because she's a threat to their real religion: liberalism."

Mrs. Robinson at Orcinus has written about how the desire for Jews to be "perfected" implies in a fundamentalist context that Jews are somehow imperfect or broken ... that they are God's chosen people who have rejected Him by not accepting the divinity of Jesus.

[W]ith it comes the idea that somehow, Jews are "less than," or "other," or "don't belong," or that it's somehow OK with God if we treat them less than fairly. Or, worse: that they are broken and imperfect, especially compared with righteous Christians like Coulter who can smugly proclaim her own "perfection" on TV.That's a dangerous notion: we all know the evil places that kind of rhetoric can take us.

Yes, we do. In Hitler's Willing Executioners, Daniel Goldhagen argued that it was the long tradition of doctrinal anti-Semitism within Christianity wedded to German nationalism that eventually gave birth to the eliminationist "solution" in Nazi Germany.

The crux of Schlussel's argument appears to be that Coulter can not be anti-Semitic because she supports the state of Israel. This is hardly indication in itself that Coulter is not an anti-Semite, since it is well understood that numerous fundamentalist Christians are vocal "supporters" of Israel because they believe its existence is essential to the Rapture occuring (after which point non-converted Jews will die in the End Times). This can be understood as anti-Semitic zionism.

But the most astonishing and disturbing part of Schlussel's post is her trafficing in memes that are instantly recognizable as being common anti-Semitic themes. She calls "billionaire atheist Jew" international financier (and one world socialist according to the conservative movement) George Soros a "fake Holocaust survivor" and accuses him of being a Nazi who rounded up Jews and sent them to their death. George Soros was a target of the Nazis, to falsely blame an international financier "billionaire atheist Jew" for Nazi crimes ... it is beyond belief.

Then there is the bit about the true religion of "Jewish libs" being liberalism. "Liberalism" in conservative movement speak is essentially a synonym for communism. Fascism in Nazi Germany was specifically a reaction against liberalism, and it was common there for Jews to be equated with liberalism/communism (the Nazis barely made a distinction; e.g. "After cleansing German art ... from the poison of the liberal-Jewish-Marxist era"), as well at to accuse wealthy liberal Marxist Jews of manipulating public opinion.

Marxism could not be eliminated by a government decision. Its elimination was the end result of a process that began with the people. But that was only possible because our propaganda had shown people that Marxism was a danger to both the state and society. The positive national discipline of the German press would never have been possible without the compete elimination of the influence of the liberal-Jewish press.

Schlussel's charges sounds like a distorted, distant echo of all that. It is testament to the notion that memes can live and evolve and can be fit to new ideologies (in this instance that of movement conservatism.)